Snow began pacing the lush carpet. “You can’t hide from me or yourself anymore, Delilah. You have to understand what’s happening. In the desert, Montoya called on the Silver Zombie. You called on me.”

“No. I didn’t. I’d never ask you for help.”

“Never? Why, Delilah? Why never?’

“I . . . don’t do that.”

“Maybe you should try it sometimes. Everybody needs help sometimes.”

“Even you?”

“Especially me now that I’m . . . defaced.”

Oh, kick me in the conscience, why don’t you? “I didn’t consciously call on you.” I’d remembered calling to the heavens for help, to any force anywhere.

“You did. And I came.”

Well, that was unfortunately too true, a few days before in Wichita.

“I just wanted to save Ric. He had the Silver Zombie to call on. You’re saying you had to butt in with the Seven Deadly Sins because of me?”

“The Sins only come when called.” Snow paced close again, tossed his long hair so the very ends sizzled across my skin. “And only you can call on me.”

“I didn’t ask for that favor. It was Ric drawing down the power of the Silver Zombie that saved that situation in the Valley of Guadalupe.”

“He survived it, Delilah. We all need more than mere survival.”

I recalled a favorite line: “Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”

Snow had certainly been that man tonight as he rang down the false front to reveal the new Metropolis he’d already built with a lot of money and also magic, probably.

Now Snow stood watching me. Waiting for me. I eyed the pulse in his throat and leaned forward to place my fingers on the beating blue-purple bruise.

“Why won’t this fade?” I asked.

“Maybe a succubus comes every night to renew it. Do you have any succubus tendencies, Delilah?”

“In your dreams.”

“That’s the place.”

I managed a smile.

Sansouci’s mantra replayed in my head.

Ric loves you.

I want you.

Snow needs you.

And I needed, maybe wanted, all of the above.

“You are the Silver Zombie, Delilah.” Snow had recognized my confusion and indecision and zeroed in. “You are the bleeding-heart purity of Mother Maria and you are the hot-blooded temptress who drives men to extremes, maybe bad, but maybe good despite themselves. The Silver Zombie is celibacy and sexuality in one contradictory, addictive package. Don’t think I don’t know all about that. But you, on the other hand, know nothing of my curse.”

“Curse?” That sobered me up fast. I stepped back. “You’ve been cursed. For how long?”

A white eyebrow lifted above the black sunglasses. A reporter soon learns nobody ever wants to tell you his or her age. Especially nowadays.

“How?” I asked next.

“Isn’t it obvious why I keep the groupies in their mosh pit forever? I can only give pleasure, never receive it.”

No! Yes. That would explain the Brimstone Kiss, the ultimate dead-end pleasure trip for women. It wouldn’t explain . . .

“But . . . when I . . . we—”

Can a smile both calm and sting?

“Every curse has an antidote, Delilah,” Snow said. “That’s the quest that keeps me going for . . . however long I have been. You can always find an antidote. Sometime. Somewhere. Somebody.”

I’d truly been shocked sober.

“You’re going to have to decide who you’re safest with, and who’s safest with you.” Sansouci’s words again.

Or, I added mentally: who I most want and need to save and who most wants and needs to save me.

Not a cakewalk.

No, indeed.

I left without another word.

Finis for now.

AT HOME IN the Enchanted Cottage, I worked on dozing off with my e-reader on my stomach.

My red velvet gown had disappeared into the cottage’s bottomless closet, probably snuggling up to the green silk one from Wichita and the ivory satin thirties wedding dress Ric had unbuttoned all seventy-two buttons of, up the sleeves and down the back. The Mrs. Peel section was Sansouci’s. I’ve always been a versatile chick.

I’ve set the ruby red slippers on my dresser as a reminder.

No, they’re not a reminder of the night’s intense discoveries.

What I need to remember was that Dorothy had finally got her head and heart together and figured a way home from Oz.

Ric had called to say he was trying out an overnight at the Metropolis. He sounded as eager as a Boy Scout on a camping trip. I’d promised to come and see in the morning.

Sansouci was somewhere in the night ministering to needy cougar and choir girl alike, imagining I could someday be his sole companion for a short off-road idyll in his long, long life span.

Snow was still onstage, his unhealed back wounds massaged by tight leather, making him writhe even more incitingly for the groupies in the mosh pit. In post–Millennium Revelation Las Vegas, someone’s pleasure is all too often someone else’s pain.

Quicksilver is lying under my bedroom window, gnawing on a treat whose source I don’t want to know.

“Me Delilah, you Quicksilver,” I say.

He looks up with those winter-blue eyes, jaws calmly cracking unlabeled animal sinews.

“I rescued you in Sunset Park, you rescue me everywhere else.”

Chomp, chomp. Smile, smile.

“I master. You . . . sidekick.”

Pause. Paws crossed. Really adorable posture, not so adorable expression. Silence.

“We both should leave Vegas and relocate to a monastery in Tibet. What do you say?”

Pause. Growl. Leap up, nose open window. Vanish for the night to exercise his needs to chase prey and enticing bitches.

Males! Can’t live with them, can’t live without them.

Correction: given recent events, they can’t live without me.

So I finally exit to Dreamland, where I’m climbing the seventeen-foot height of the Caesars Palace reproduction of Michelangelo’s David like I’d once climbed the pillar likeness of Shezmou to free the chained demon god of the slaughter by bringing his avatar to earth and commercial success on the Las Vegas Strip.

Michelangelo loved men and the male form. I’m not indifferent. In my dream, I find I can turn David’s sculpted muscles of white Carrara marble, cold stone, into living flesh tones with the kisses of my brimstone mouth, but it will take a really long, long time to cover all that territory.

I guess I can make the climb with a little help from my friends, lover and would-be lovers, and my frenemies.